Terrorists who stage attacks on United States soil should be identified as Islamic caliphate operatives — not disturbed loners, former Navy SEAL and FBI agent Jonathan Gilliam says.
"The thing I hate worst is when we call them lone wolves. The fact is these are all operatives of the same ideology and they're here. I mean there's no doubt that they're here," Gilliam said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"We were attacked on 9/11, we were attacked in Boston, there's been multiple times when just up in New York last week a guy was arrested for trying to recruit people.
"We [should see] these people as operatives of this fundamental Islamic caliphate. That's the most important thing we can take from any of these threats and this heightened awareness that we have."
Gilliam, president of US Continued Service, LLC, disagrees with President Barack Obama that the terrorist group ISIS now threatening the United States is not Islamic.
"I guess then he would disagree that the 1 million, maybe 1.5 million Armenians that were killed in the early 1900s were not killed by Islamic caliphate movement," he said.
"And I guess he would also say that Mohammed himself did not practice Islam and that the caliphs that came after did not practice the same type of caliphate that they're trying to put in place now."
He said lawmakers in Washington know little about the inner workings of terrorism.
"One thing that the American public needs to realize is that politicians are just like professional football players. They are professionals at being politicians," he said.
"As far as I know, the president was never a Special Forces operator, he was never in law enforcement, and he was really not even in politics for that long before he became president.
"I am an expert in this field and I will tell you what he is not telling you — that they are in fact Islamic, they do practice the fundamental belief that a caliph needs to be in place in order to get this Islamic state, and all of these different groups, there's no separation between them."
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